Independent Bookshop Week starts tomorrow – yippee!! Independent Bookshop Week (24th June - 1st July 2017) is part of the Books Are My Bag campaign,
and seeks to celebrate independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland with events
galore. We LOVE it – good luck to everyone who is hosting some sort of
celebration! You can find out more at www.indiebookshopweek.org.uk
This
week was National Breastfeeding Week and ex-midwife, parenting consultant and
author Rachel Fitz-Desorgher hosted a Q&A session on the Mother and Baby
social media pages to talk about this while ever so subtly promoting her
fantastic new book Your Baby Skin to Skin (£12.99, pb, 978 1910336311) which is out from White Ladder Press. If
you’re on Facebook, you can watch that session here - there
have been over 4,500 views of it already! Your Baby
Skin to Skin has had ecstatic reviews
from parents, e.g. “After my second baby was born, I got rid of all the parenting
books I had ever bought and swore I'd never buy another. The conflicting advice
about 'the right way' to parent in the early years had ended up feeling deeply
unhelpful. Your Baby Skin to Skin is the first book I've picked up since then
that has had the opposite effect. It reminded me that the most helpful advice
is simply to trust my instincts and listen to my baby” and really does give
parents a fresh, empowering approach by the woman who has been described as “the
best mother, doula, midwife and best friend all rolled into one”.
Here's
a cool story – a dustbin man in Columbia
has built a free community library of thrown away books. Mr Gutierrez, who has
gained the nickname The Lord of the Books, began collecting books that
had been dumped in the waste bins in wealthier parts of the city – the
collection began with discarded copy of Anna Karenina.
The Sunday Herald's Culture Awards, dubbed Scotland's Oscars, have been
unveiled and many congratulations to Birlinn who have THREE authors on
the Author of the Year shortlist. The awards, now in their second year,
are to celebrate, reward and nurture the huge pool of talent across the
Scottish arts and cultural scene and the Birlinn three join a starry
line up which include Ewan McGregor, Karen Gillan and David Tennant. The
authors are: Liz Lochhead (Fugitive Colours,
978 1846973451), Kevin MacNeil (The Brilliant &
Forever, 978 1846973376) and Malachy Tallack (The Un-Discovered Islands 978
846973505 and 60 Degrees North 978
1846973420). The Culture Awards will be held on Thursday, July 13, 2017 at
Glasgow’s stylish art and music venue, SWG3.
James
McAvoy won
a Culture award last year – I love this
clip of him on The Late Show
explaining to a US audience exactly what it means to be Scottish!
There was an excellent interview with Alison Murdoch this
week, discussing her powerful and poignant book Bed
12 (£9.99, pb, 9780995647800) about
how it feels to suddenly plunge into the world of acute medicine, on BBC
Radio London: you can listen to that here; (it
starts at 2hours 6 minutes in). Dr Phil Hammond said this book was “a love
letter to the NHS, and the everyday acts of kindness that keep it afloat ... it
needs to be widely read” and Alison will be talking about it on Good
Morning Sunday on 25th June and Hikari Press are expecting more
coverage for it in the Guardian, Red Magazine and the Evening
Standard. Alison will also be reading at The Jamyang Buddhist Centre in
London on Saturday 24th June – details
are here – and talking at The Royal Medical Society on 7th July.
In a thoroughly uncertain world, what you need to set
yourself up for the day is a superfood breakfast and Lorenz have just
the book. Superfood Breakfasts! 50 Smoothie Bowls,
Power Bars & Energy Balls: Smoothie Bowls and Power-Packed Seed Bars and
Balls to Start the Day by Sara Lewis (hb, £9.99, 978 0754832379) is bursting with fabulous
breakfast ideas packed with essential vitamins, minerals, good fats, good carbs
and fibre to help keep our body in tip-top shape and to boost our immunity. Soul
and Spirit Magazine is featuring this title in in its July issue – you can see a couple of spreads from it below!
This week is Refugee
Week so an ideal opportunity to remind you about Voices from the Jungle (pb, £14.99, 978
0745399683). The refugee camp near Calais epitomises for many the suffering,
uncertainty and violence which characterises the situation of refugees in
Europe today. But the media soundbites we hear often ignore the voices of the
people who lived there; people who are looking for peace and a better future,
people with astounding stories. Voices from the
Jungle is a collection of these
stories told in powerful, vivid language and illustrated with photographs, poems
and drawings by the refugees. It paints a picture of a different kind of
Jungle; one with a powerful sense of community despite evictions and attacks,
and of a solidarity which crosses national and religious boundaries. It should
be read by anyone hoping to understand this crisis a little better and you can
see some of the pictures and read extracts from it on a blog here introduced
by one of the editors, Katrine Møller Hansen.
There have been promotional events for it linking in with Refugee Week at UEL,
and at Book and Kitchen tomorrow – you can see more info about that one here.
Voices from the Jungle: Stories from the Calais Refuge Camp is published by Pluto.
The Threat Level Remains Severe (pb, £8.99, 978 1910709153) published next month by Gallic
has been chosen as one of Red Online's top summer reads - you
can see that here and
its author Rowena Macdonald will feature in the Telegraph's Stella
magazine on 2nd July, writing about her experience of having been stalked at
work. Confirmed magazine review coverage also includes Good Housekeeping
and Closer.
What’s the difference between a public service
organisation and a sailing boat? You can find the answer here in an
extract from The Moral Heart of Public Service,
where its editor Claire Foster-Gilbert of the Westminster Abbey Institute explores why we so
often think that members of the public service lack moral integrity. There was
some great publicity this week in the Telegraph for this title which has
just been published by Jessica Kingsley; a long interview with one of
the contributors, Mary McAleese with two
juicy plugs for the book!
On the subject of moral integrity, and as the Brexit talks
finally grind into gear, I think it’s a good time to watch this –
Tracey Ullman as Angela Merkel!
Millions of teens around the country are in the throes of
exams. Tears, tizzes and tantrums abound – and that's just the parents. Two men
hoping to help children and their parents get a handle on the most effective
ways of revising, and handling stress have a brilliant book out from Crown
House packed with their expert tips – and it’s getting lots of publicity! Bradley Busch and Edward Watson have worked with Premier League footballers and
Olympians, and strongly believe that the techniques they’ve used to coach elite
athletes can help children achieve their potential. Release
Your Inner Drive: Everything You Need to Know about How to Get Good at Stuff (£9.99,
pb, 978 1785831997) was featured recently here in
the Daily Mail, and here in
the Guardian and there will be more to come – these authors are GREAT at
self-promotion! “LOVE this book. Perfect for teenagers as has lots of tips
based on research. The graphics are fab and really colourful, so grabs
attention quickly. The parts on motivation and mindset really stand out. Would
definitely recommend other parents get this book” is typical of the Amazon
reviews – do NOT let them get all the sales!!
Actually, I think all you need to know about revision and
exams is contained in this classic
Mr Bean clip – I can’t actually believe it was first broadcast 27 years ago!!
Still comedy gold IMO.
A phenomenon in Turkey with more than 120,000 copies sold;
Women Who Blow on Knots (pb, £9.99, 978
1910901694) chronicles a voyage reaching from Tunisia to Lebanon, taken by
three young women and septuagenarian Madam Lilla. Its author Ece Temelkuran weaves
an empowering tale pondering not only the social questions of politics,
religion and women in the Middle East, but also the universal bonds of sister-
and motherhood. Unique and controversial in its country of origin for its
political rhetoric and strong, atypically Muslim female characters, it is Foyle’s
Book of the Month for June and there have also been well attended events
promoting it at Waterstones Piccadilly and Trafalgar Square;
preview launches at Asia House, and appearances at the Hay Festival, the
Edinburgh Festival and the Stoke Newington Literature Festival. KulturWest described
it as being “like a firework. It is the book where Twitter and the Thousand
and One Nights fairytales meet.” Ece Temelkuran is one of Turkey’s best-known novelists and political
commentators and this title is a PEN Translates
Award Winner – definitely one to
watch. As one reviewer said “If you cannot think of a better road story with
heroines other than Thelma & Louise, you should read this novel”. It
has just been published by Parthian.
When does a riot become a revolution? When does a
demonstration of dissent tip over into a moment of unstoppable political
change? Protest: Stories of Resistance (pb, £14.99, 978 1905583737) asked fifteen authors to
bring crucial moments of British protest to life. Each author is paired with
either a historian or a genuine witness to the protest; resulting in the
stories being both readable and factually informed; and each tale is then
followed by an accessibly written afterword by the witness or historian. By
following fictional characters caught up in the momentum of nonfictional
moments, the stories offer rare insights into protests from a live,
street-level perspective and include the Peasants Revolt, the Suffragettes, the
1960s Civil Rights Movement, Greenham Common, and more. The authors include Frank Cottrell Boyce, David Constantine, Alexei Sayle and Maggie Gee.
This is a brilliant and timely idea for a short story anthology – it has a
great cover and it is published by Comma Press on 6 July. You can see
some of the authors reading their stories on YouTube here.
That’s all for now folks! More next
week!
This blog is taken from a newsletter which is sent weekly to over 700 booksellers as
well as publishers and publicists. If you would like to order any of the titles
mentioned, then please talk to your Compass Sales Manager, or call the office
on 020 8326 5696. And if you'd like to subscribe to the newsletter so that you get it every week in your own inbox then please submit your email at the foot of this page!
No comments:
Post a Comment